The alternative I was talking about are called employee brains.

There exists an alternative that uses a lot less power. And also that power is going to get spent no matter what anyway.

In the past few years, my workplace has used Webex, Zoom and Teams. I definitely hate that we’re using Teams now because the others are better when it comes to meetings. Teams is unusable for me half the time while the others just worked. Lag spike during the call? Now the microphone doesn’t work. Or it will work but no one can understand you while you talk.

In my work machine, mine has a special feature when someone shares their screen during a call and you go full-screen - the extreme audio lag feature.

Now, instead of debugging the code, you have to debug the data. Sounds worse.

Teams started out okay. But the recent update made it worse. The microphone constantly disconnects now. Earlier today I lost sound completely just when I was being asked to talk. And the sound starts to get choppy during screen shares. I rarely had these issues with Webex and Zoom. So it’s not even more compatible with their own software. EU doesn’t have anything to worry about. /s

To their credit, at least they’re still trying to build stuff. Microsoft avoids this problem by no longer innovating and just buying into whatever is trending. (Not that Google also isn’t doing the same). If you never build anything new, you never risk killing a product that didn’t trend, which happens a lot.

I get logged out every time I change VPN location, and sometimes I’m too lazy to log back in. Does being logged out count as inactive?

That’s similar to what I thought their Xbox strategy was. The rich kid buys an entire store because he has no idea how to prepare things for a party(i.e., make games). Now he owns the store (which is profitable tbf) but he still has no idea how to throw a party (i.e., Xbox games like Halo are still dead and they still don’t have a good play test strategy the way Sony or Valve does so they keep releasing broken games). Xbox over the years slowly lost the formula to making great games to poor corporate management.

Good for you.

I hear Zuck once threatened to pull Meta out of the EU too. Musk is a real man though. No joke, he can probably be goaded to do it, just like how he got baited into buying Twitter in the first place.

What? It takes 5 minutes to pop your new CD in the drive and let Windows Media player handle it for you, track information included.

Youtube doesn’t run for free, but they can save more money by firing a few executives than go after the minority adblock users. It’s not the creators that really matter (but they’re the group of people who are visible and who we can relate to) but you would not be saying the same thing if they were totally honest and say they’re raising money so the executives can keep on “executing” and that investors can keep their short term profits.

Quantity over quality eh? I hope that doesn’t happen to subscription-based gaming.

We don’t rip CDs anymore so you can store them as MP3s on your phone? People have forgotten how to do that? I’m getting old.

What are people’s predictions on what will happen to ABK after he leaves? Personally, I’ve never played COD and the last Blizzard game I played was Diablo 2, so I don’t know what they’ve been doing.

It’s always MS who has people on the internet defending them when they do it, to the point that it looks like MS social media presence is being carefully managed, like Apple. I saw it happen on Reddit too, and it happened less and less the more they got called out. The same “$70 a year for Office 365 is so worth it” is a talking point when I was on Reddit. Apparently, people here say the same thing.

How would cooling our jets help? I really like the idea of going into Linux, and the more MS pushes the subscription/rental model, the more I’m encouraged to do so. Corporations like to float their ideas to the media as a way of surveying the market. These rumors could be just that. The idea of building a Linux PC sounds fun. I never had the need for any of these subscription services. I have a backlog of games I own, my own HDDs, MP3s, from CDs or the like, that I bought. I don’t need to pay yearly for those.